Another game recommendation! I’ve always loved the idea of decoration games, but they kinda intimidate me. Make Room is a REALLY easy to pick up diorama builder! You can make rooms based on request, as well as use its sandbox mode to do whatever you want. It also has an in-game asset builder so you can make unique decorations and share it on the steam workshop! It looks like it’s made by one dev, and I’m extremely impressed. It’s still getting updates, too!
Had to make Hazel’s apartment room because I have VTM brainrot. ☝️ He doesn’t have a bed because he doesn’t deserve one 🙂↕️
Hi how's your day going? I was wondering if you have game recommendations from games you discovered recently!
i played a few Toxic Yuri Game Jam submissions! warnings for Actually Toxic Stuff Please Read The Content Warnings
mado is an amazing creator and this one doesn't miss. SO GROSS!!!! EW!!!!!!!! EWWWWWWWWW!!!!!! one scene in particular will stay with me forever. actually nauseous just thinking about it (positive) [ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY AND I AM NOT JOKING]
misery for the modern millenial maiden (21+)
fairy chess looks so good... i took notes on its visual presentation. fascinating story and lore too! [for adult audiences also]
A story about coerced reverse lobotomization and chess games.
this one was so sweet i actually forgot it was a toxic yuri submission and got violently reminded. [rated T for Teen but still got to me. harrowing]
THE SEME IN MY YAOI SHIP CAME TO LIFE AS A HOT WOMAN WHO LIVES IN MY BEDROOM?
not toxic yuri but this one button roguelike goes hard as hell [e for everypony]
one button horror roguelike
let's wash your brain. everyone go play nubby's number factory right now [for nubbys only]
A plinko-style roguelike where you work at a number factory. Launch your spherical friend, Nubby, down a pegboard to make bigger and bigger
So Disco Elysium is the only game you've ever really liked
I get it! It's a phenomenal game with superb art and writing, and its themes are consistent and deeply explored. It sets a high bar for video games. But there are other really, really fantastic games out there. This is a list that is 100% my own taste of things that aren't necessarily similar, other than the fact that they're really fucking good. (A lot of these are on sale for the Steam Summer Sale until July 11 2024!)
In Stars and Time
In Stars and Time is a time loop game where you play as Siffrin, the rogue of a party at the end of their quest to save the day by defeating the King, who is freezing everybody in time! But something is wrong: every time you die, you loop back to the day before you fight the King. You're the only one who remembers the loops, so it's up to you to figure out why it's happening, and how to break out.
In Stars and Time is a heart-wrenching dive into mental health, friendship, and love. It's about feeling alone, and how awful it is when the people who love you don't notice (and how awful it is when they do). It's about falling deeper and deeper into your worst self and your worst tendencies, and how to come back from it.
The creator also did one of my favorite Disco Elysium comics ever, which is only tangentially relevant but worth mentioning.
Roadwarden
In Roadwarden, you play as the titular Roadwarden for an undeveloped and "wild" part of the kingdom. Monsters roam the forests and roads, and it's your job to keep people safe. On paper, anyway. Your real mission is to find out what is of value in the area, and how to take it from its people. How well you perform this task is up to you. It's an oldschool text-based RPG, and I take a lot of notes by hand when I play.
Roadwarden explores exploitation and industrialization by making you look in the face of your potential victims. You can only learn what your bosses want you to report on by getting close to the residents, after all. There are mysteries to be solved, secrets to be gathered, and hearts to win.
The Longing
The Longing is an adventure-idle game where you play as the solitary servant of a sleeping king. Your task is to wait for him, for four hundred days. Time in the game passes in realtime (for the most part). There are caves to explore, books to be read, and drawings to make.
The Longing is about loneliness and depression. It's about whether or not you decide to stay in that hole, and if you do, what you do with yourself while you're there. Maybe you'll wander. Maybe you'll stare at a wall. Maybe you'll just sleep until it's all over.
Papers, Please
Papers, Please casts you as a newly hired customs officer in a country that is rapidly tightening its borders as its fascist government tightens its fist. This game is stressful. Sometimes you intend to help out the revolutionaries when they asked, but then you got so stressed out trying to make your quota so you can feed your family and pay your bills that you didn't notice the name of the person they were hoping to contact while going through their papers. Sometimes someone puts a bomb in front of you and expects you to defuse it. Sometimes someone suggests you steal people's passports so you can get your family out, and with the horror you see daily, the idea tempts you more than you'd like.
Papers, Please is all about hard choices and testing your moral fortitude. Everything you do has consequences. Being a good person in this game is hardly ever rewarded, but not in a way that feels overly cynical. Papers, Please asks you what kind of person you want to be and what you're willing to sacrifice to get there.
The Return of the Obra Dinn
From the creator of Papers, Please, The Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you play as an insurance investigator for the East India Trading Company. The ship the Obra Dinn has just floated back into port, its entire crew missing or dead. It's your job to figure out what happened aboard the vessel. For insurance reasons.
I don't know how to go into the themes of this too deeply without giving away too much, but the mechanics of the game itself make the game worth playing. You have a magic stopwatch that allows you to go back to the moment of a person's death, allowing you to try and figure out who (or what) killed them, and how. And the soundtrack is extremely good.
Outer Wilds
In Outer Wilds you play as an unnamed alien, and it's your first day going to space! Your planet's space program is pretty new still, so there's still lots to explore and discover on the planets within your system. There are ancient ruins from a mysterious race that once lived in your system, long before your species began to record history. Why were they here? Where did they go? How are they connected to the weird thing that keeps happening to you?
The fun of Outer Wilds is in the discovery and answering your own questions. The game never tells you where to go, and it never outright tells you anything. There are clues scattered through the system, and it's up to you to put them together and figure out your next steps. It's about the way that life always goes on, no matter what, even when it seems like the end of everything, forever. I'd recommend NOT reading anything else about this game. Just go play it. Seriously, the less you know, the more fun this is.
If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers
In If on a Winter's Night, Four Travelers, you explore the circumstances of the deaths of four individuals.
This is a short one that took me about two and a half hours to play. If for no other reason, play it for the stunning pixel art. The game explores sexism, racism, and homophobia in the Victorian era and leans heavily into horror themes. Best of all: it's completely free!
Pentiment
Pentiment takes you to the 16th century, where you take the role of Andreas Maler, a journeyman artist working on his masterwork in the scriptorium of an abbey. When someone is murdered, Andreas takes responsibility for finding the culprit.
The game is set over 20~ years and you get to watch how Andreas' actions affect the village in various ways (who's alive the next time you come by, have people gotten married and had children...). It's an exploration of how the past affects the future, and what parts of that past we choose to keep or discard. It has beautiful art, and fans of both Disco and Pentiment often compare them.
Other games you might wanna check out
Night in the Woods, Dredge, Oxenfree, A House of Many Doors, Inscryption, Slay the Princess, Citizen Sleeper, Chants of Sennar, Loop Hero, The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood, The Pale Beyond, Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Elsinore, Her Story, Before Your Eyes, Pathologic (not delved into above because the venn diagram of Pathologic fans and Disco fans is basically a circle)
you know what i'm a massive fucking fan of? horror romance. not paranormal romance with hot werewolves and shit. (that's cool too, just not what i'm talking about.) i mean media that goes "k so this world is profoundly fucked up..and we're gonna tell a story about people being in love"
Interact-IF's Aug 2026 writing spotlight will focus on underrated/smaller/newer IF* titles, and includes categories that were suggested by the community during the previous Writing Spotlight:
Fave Enemy/Rival/Villain
Fave Ensemble Cast
Fave Plot Twist
Fave Character Development/Redemption Arc
Fave Premise
We hope it will help shine a light on more games besides the ones that are often spoken about!
Please nominate games that you think fit under each category via this google form.
Nominations are open from now till August 15, and we really encourage you to submit titles because it would directly improve the quality of the resulting recommendation lists!
After nominations close, we will open another form for voting before tallying the results and publishing the recommendations.
Admin notes
*It's difficult to define underrated/small/new IFs in a completely objective/definitive way, so we might need to exercise judgment depending on the resulting nominations. Generally, we will avoid including titles that have previously featured by Interact-IF in the previous "Best of" Writing Spotlight, and/or IF titles that have been around for more than 3 years.
Do try to provide the name of the character (if relevant) and game/IF that it is in. If you would like to nominate more than one game, separate them with line breaks or commas :)
hiii oomf. smiles. i think we get to yap in here. ivebeen getting a lot of new games since moving out. recently finished your turn to die and i also bought the stanley parable cause it went on sale. idk what it’s about but i’ve heard good things. i love my games #mygames
also what does more weight mean
Ooooh you’re gonna LOVE The Stanley Parable!!! It’s so queer in a very difficult to explain way, but, whatever you’ll see!!
Oh! I’m actually glad you asked that, it’s a reference to this case from the Salem Witch Trials.
Giles Corey - Wikipedia
The TL;DR is, Giles and his wife were accused of witchcraft, and he refused to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges because he found them to be ridiculous. The punishment for this was pressing, which means the victim was placed between two flat boards and heavy rocks were laid on top of them until they were slowly crushed to death. This process took at least two days to kill Giles, and he was asked to plead either way multiple times to make it stop. Instead of pleading, every time he was asked, he just said, “more weight.” His tongue, allegedly, popped out of his mouth under the pressure and had to be forced back in. Reportedly, his last words were, “more weight.”
Ooh, yeah! I don't play them often, but I've played a few that I've enjoyed and gone back to a couple of times. If you want more in depth and someone who REALLY knows what they're talking about, @theresattrpgforthat has anything you could ever want.
Some that I have played and enjoyed:
For medium-to-heavy on the journaling:
Over The Mountain by Marchcrow (@hillbillyoracle here on tumblr). [FREE] You live in the mountains! You have neighbors! Some are human and some are spirits! It's just one double-sided page of tables that you roll on for locations, neighbors, items, events, etc. There's stuff like dungeons, seasons, a friendship mechanic, all with enough structure to give some writing prompts, but freeform enough for you to make it what you want. Being a single page, it's really easy to fold in half and tuck into your journal. Have a pen with you and a way to roll dice, and you've got your whole game right there.
(Actually while I'm here, anything by Marchcrow. Check out their itch.io page! Over the Mountain is not the only thing they have done, and you'll probably find something that fits your vibe. There's one where you use a tarot deck to grow a garden. There's a rage room. See what you find!)
The Lighthouse at the Edge of the Universe by lostwaysclub. [$10.00, but pay-it-forward Community Copies are frequently available for those who can't afford it). What it says on the tin, pretty much: You're a lighthouse keeper at the lighthouse at the edge of the universe. You keep the light on, observe the ships that pass by through the stars, maintain the lighthouse, collect things that wash up on the island. It's a little melancholy and peaceful. This one is played with a deck of cards and... I forget whether it's a die or a coin? But it's very simple gameplay, easy to pick up and play quickly, or for longer entries if you wish. I have found myself playing this one at night when I can't sleep, or if I'm feeling just a little bleh. It's nice to go retreat to the lighthouse for a bit.
A Little Less Journaling, A Little More Action:
It's In the Vents! by biggayuniverse. [Pay What You Want] It's Alien. You're on a spaceship, there's an alien, you gotta get off, but there's a cat that you have to go retrieve first. This one is played with a deck of playing cards laid out in a grid, and a token representing you. You move through the grid, flipping over cards and reacting to the prompts while you search for the cat, then (hopefully) get back to the escape pod. You can journal this one if you want to, or just play it like you'd play a quick game of solitaire.
(If you enjoy It's In The Vents! then look up other games using the Carta system. That's the playing-card-grid system, and there are plenty of other games on itch.io that use it)
Dungeon Hero by Lone Spelunker. [Pay What You Want] Sometimes you just want to roll some dice. Dungeon Hero has three different adventures that you can play through, all with the same basic idea of gameplay. There's a long list of rooms. You start at the beginning, roll to see how many steps you advance, and then deal with what's in that room. It might be a battle! Could be some treasure! Maybe a puzzle that you'll need to use your skills about! Roll some more dice to hopefully beat that encounter or see how much treasure you acquire, then roll again to advance. It's really good for when you want to play something by yourself, but you don't necessarily want to put too much effort into making up a story about it (though you certainly could). I also love this one because you print it on a single page and then fold it into a little pocket-sized zine, so I frequently have one of the adventures tucked into my dice bag.
idk why im literally not seeing this anywhere but there's this daily puzzle browser game i've been playing called enclose.horse where you have to enclose a horse in the biggest possible pen and it looks like this
you can even make your own levels and the puzzles are very satisfying to solve and it's free and really cute like why am i not seeing anyone talk about it
